frugal vs pen - boot problems


Forum: USB booting
Topic: frugal vs pen - boot problems
started by: eydaimon
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 25 2007,04:00
1) what is the difference between frugal and pendrive?

2) I've tried installing frugal to /dev/sda1. when booting, lilo hangs when I select to boot from the usb drive. Any particular reason it would do that?


3) I also tried installing via pendrive, then I get this error:

Setting up system image on /mnt/sda1
cp: cannot stat `/cdrom/linux24': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat `/cdrom/minirt24.gz': No such file or directory
Setting up lilo
Fatal: open /boot/linux24: No such file or directory
Installation complete.

ideas?

This is all using version 4.0
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 25 2007,04:08
I modified /usr/sbin/frugal_lilo.sh

by adding BOOT="/cdrom/boot/isolinux/"

and that got rid of the errors in step 3.

now to see if it works...
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 25 2007,04:26
on closer inspection I should only ever do option "L"

but anyway, with grub install, it says invalid operating system when trying to boot, and with Lilo, it hangs with just an "L" on the screen.
Posted by roberts on Oct. 25 2007,05:28
Frugal is for hard drive partitons, neither grub or lilo would support pendrive.
pendrive_usbhdd.sh is for pendrives which support usbhdd. This makes two partition the larger of which is vfat, shareable with Windows, and preconfigured with a proper mydsl folder. Do nut use if you have a SATA drive installed as sda.

There are many ways to install on pendrive. The included pendrive install script only support grub and usbhdd.

FYI: You can boot DSL with the install menu
boot: install

If you decide to manually or use other installation type then be aware of the mydsl folder permission requirements. And the size limitations of some boot loaders.

Posted by Juanito on Oct. 25 2007,08:00
For me, due to the large number of options available to boot from usb sticks, it is perhaps better to do it manually.

If you boot from cd, it is relatively easy (using posts in this formum or the wiki) to format a usb stick (fat16, fat32 or ext2), install the loader (syslinux or extlinux), unpack the iso and copy the necessary files to usb.

I've been using freeware ext2 drivers on a couple of windows pc's to read ext2 partitions for about a year now without problems - even the workaround to read multiple usb stick partitions (fat16, fat32 or ext2) in windows is not that difficult.
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 26 2007,22:17
The problem isn't with the instal. the install goes smoothly, the question is why Lilo doesn't boot?

My USB drive is not a flash drive, but a mini hdd.

The USB drive shows up as /dev/sda

I made a 50 mb /dev/sda1 partition with ext2
I made the remaining into FAT32 on /dev/sda2(so I can boot it in linux and also access all data from both windows and linux).

I made MyDSL dir to be in /dev/sda2 and backups to be on /dev/sda2

lilo seems to install fine.

Then during boot, I select to boot form USB boot device... and all I get is that "L"

using grub I just get a failure saying no OS was found. (I think from the bios)

Any ideas?
Posted by roberts on Oct. 27 2007,04:13
If you get the grub menu then at least you know your bios is attempting to boot from it and can read the mbr. My first suggestion is to add a waitusb to the boot options. This will allow time for the usb drive to register. Pressing e from the grub menu will allow you to specify this.
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 27 2007,04:53
I'm not getting a grub menu. The bios gives an error saying there's no OS available to boot. It gives me the same error if I try to boot from my floppy drive which I don't have.
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 29 2007,06:19
anyone have any ideas about this lilo/boot problem?
Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Oct. 29 2007,16:20
Did you try the pendrive installations?
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 29 2007,16:47
Quote (^thehatsrule^ @ Oct. 29 2007,11:20)
Did you try the pendrive installations?

I tried the installation available from the install disk. (options 'l' and 'p'). Are there other installations available?

Maybe the boot record isn't being written to the appropriate place?
Posted by roberts on Oct. 29 2007,19:08
Have you verified that your bios can boot from removal usb drive?

Using grub hard drive install script will write grub into MBR on the installing system, not good for a removal device. Using lilo writes in the target partition. It would require that your bios will allow you to change the active boot partition to usb, which is doubtful as again this is a removal device.

The 4.0 grub pendrive install scripts forces grub to be written into sda1.

Since you are trying to install to a removal device, you will likely need to do manual install of grub for your particular setup and hopefully your bios is capable of booting from such usb device.
Posted by eydaimon on Oct. 29 2007,19:57
Quote (roberts @ Oct. 29 2007,14:08)
Have you verified that your bios can boot from removal usb drive?

Using grub hard drive install script will write grub into MBR on the installing system, not good for a removal device. Using lilo writes in the target partition. It would require that your bios will allow you to change the active boot partition to usb, which is doubtful as again this is a removal device.

The 4.0 grub pendrive install scripts forces grub to be written into sda1.

Since you are trying to install to a removal device, you will likely need to do manual install of grub for your particular setup and hopefully your bios is capable of booting from such usb device.

It is supported by the bios, but I suppose I can try my drive on another machine just to double check.

I think I only tried the 4.0 lilo pendrive install. But it seemd te pendrive install indiciated it was an install "from" a pendrive?
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